Vital Data: Making Markets and Changing Lives with a Global Insurance Platform

Operating in nearly 40 countries through strategic partnerships with some of the largest insurers in the world, Vitality is a market leader in data-driven, behaviour-based wellbeing platforms for life and health insurance. Describing itself as “the world’s largest behavioral platform linked to financial services,” Vitality is the model for insurance programs focused on offering consumers reward incentives (e.g. points for free Apple Watches) based on information feedback (e.g. sharing exercise and eating data) for the purpose of inducing behaviour change (e.g. leading less risky, healthier lifestyles) and increasing engagement (e.g. regular, direct interactions) between policyholders and insurers. This presentation will offer an in-depth case study into the practices of market making and data sharing that have made Vitality a powerful player in the global insurance industry—one that explicitly aims to directly influence the behaviours of 100 million people.

Jathan Sadowski is a Senior Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. He holds a DECRA Fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council for a project studying the political economy of insurance technology (insurtech). Jathan is also the author of Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (The MIT Press, 2020).

The event is part of the Seminar Series “Platform Politics and Policy”.

Researchers from outside the WZB who would like to attend may email the organizer, robert.gorwa [at] wzb.eu, to be put onto the seminar series mailing list.